Noreen McKee speaks to the Times Union Friday morning April 11, 2014 at her home in Troy, N.Y., about her husband Steve who died of heart disease after years of working to prevent the condition. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) less

Noreen McKee speaks to the Times Union Friday morning April 11, 2014 at her home in Troy, N.Y., about her husband Steve who died of heart disease after years of working to prevent the condition. (Skip ... more

Noreen McKee speaks to the Times Union Friday morning April 11, 2014 at her home in Troy, N.Y., about her husband Steve who died of heart disease after years of working to prevent the condition. (Skip Dickstein / Times Union) less

Noreen McKee speaks to the Times Union Friday morning April 11, 2014 at her home in Troy, N.Y., about her husband Steve who died of heart disease after years of working to prevent the condition. (Skip ... more

Steve McKee spent his life fending off his father's legacy of heart disease.

A journalist who lived in Troy the last two years of his life, McKee wrote in his 2008 memoir, "My Father's Heart," about his father's death at 50 and how it fueled his obsession to overcome his genetic inheritance. By all accounts, his drive to avoid his father's fate through healthy living was as fierce as any professional athlete training to confront a formidable opponent.

Except McKee's enemy was himself, or at least his DNA.

Nine years ago, McKee was himself diagnosed with heart disease. At the end of March, he died of complications from surgery to repair a torn aorta. He was 61.

It's easy to see his story the way his longtime primary care doctor does.

"His case shows that we can't escape from our genetics," said Dr. Eric Kenworthy of Brooklyn. "He was very diligent in keeping his pressure controlled and eating well and exercising, and I guess the lesson is that we can't completely escape our parents."

But McKee's wife, Noreen, has a different perspective. Her husband won his battle, she said.

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Steve McKee, then 16, watched his father die of a heart attack in 1969 at the family home in York, Pa. "I was taking my father's pulse when it stopped," McKee wrote in a 1997 article in the Wall Street Journal, where he was a copy editor.

His father's early death was not without precedent: McKee's grandfather was 53 when he died of a heart attack 30 years before, when his father was 21. Even before his father's death, McKee decided he would break the pattern. His father's first heart attack, in 1963, was a warning shot, McKee wrote. A few years later, he was into the fitness craze before it even started, running at the junior-high track every morning. His exercise routine morphed over the years with his age and change from rural to urban residences, to at various times encompass weightlifting, swimming, ice skating, bicycling, rowing on a machine and long, fast walks. He competed in triathlons. He watched his diet, too. He kept his 6-foot-8-inch frame trim.

Yet in 2005, at age 52, McKee was diagnosed with heart disease. His cholesterol was high, and, worse, so was his coronary calcium score, he wrote in the Journal in 2005. Calcium indicates the presence of plaque, which can lead to blocked arteries — and ultimately a heart attack.

"I am my father's son," McKee wrote.

He redoubled his efforts, Noreen McKee said.

In September of last year, McKee was alone in the Troy home where he and Noreen had moved to be closer to their son. He felt severe pain in his left arm and thought he was having the heart attack he'd been warding off all his adult life, according to Noreen. He called 911. At Albany Medical Center Hospital, doctors found a tear in his ascending aorta, the portion of the body's main artery that rises upward from the heart. McKee underwent nine hours of emergency heart surgery, during which he suffered a stroke.

But, Noreen McKee stressed, the cause of the problem was not heart disease.

"It's not what he was trying to avoid, which he did avoid," she said.

McKee spent months in outpatient rehabilitation at Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital in Schenectady. True to form, he worked harder than doctors asked to get back to health.

But in March, McKee had more pain — another tear, this time to the descending aorta, the same artery, after it arches and heads downward. The tear stretched to his abdomen, said Dr. Manish Mehta of Albany Med, the surgeon who operated on him. The 3-1/2-hour surgery, performed March 10, was a success. But 10 days later, McKee had another stroke, this time a devastating one. As days passed and his condition worsened, Noreen McKee made the difficult decision to take her husband off life support. He died March 31.

The underlying cause of McKee's aortic tears is not certain, Mehta said. Albany Med doctors suspected he may have had Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects tall, lanky people. But Kenworthy said he'd never had any symptoms of Marfan, other than being unusually tall. After McKee died, there was no reason to check for the disorder, because he had no one to pass those genes on to; the McKees' son is adopted.

What is clear is that he did not die like his forebears of heart disease. High blood pressure may have been associated with both McKee's heart troubles and the aortic tear, but they are not the same thing, Mehta said.

"He did not die of coronary heart disease," Mehta said.

McKee may have changed his destiny in the most important way. Until the last few months of his life, he stayed healthy and lived well, in a way his father did not. His father's first heart attack came at 44, and after that he "retreated into inactivity," McKee wrote. He resumed smoking and spent less time outdoors.

Whether because of a natural disposition or the lessons of his father's untimely death or both, the younger McKee lived each day as if it might be his last, Noreen said. He did not spend it exercising to save his life, but kept healthy to live his life, she said. Steve once traveled the country and charmed his way, without paid tickets, into major sporting events — really major ones, like the Super Bowl — as part of a book he was writing, without a contract. (The book, "The Call of the Game," was published in 1982, by McGraw-Hill.)

He landed a job with the Wall Street Journal. He wrote a daily column from the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. And he wrote the book about his father.

"He was a big guy, a big personality," Noreen McKee said. "He loved life. He lived it to its fullest."